Editor’s note: Senior opinion editor Frank Hill writes context with the excerpts in this article that appears on Yahoo! Sports.
It is easy to overblow the importance of any college football game in America.
However, one game, the 1926 Rose Bowl, justifiably can be identified as having a seismic effect not only on the college sports scene but on the entire psyche of The South a half-century removed from the Civil War.
Jay Busbee wrote about the impact of this game in Yahoo Sports on Dec. 27, 2023, excerpts of which follow below:
“There was a time when the nation regarded football in Alabama — in all of the South, really — as unworthy of notice, much less respect. Eastern legacy colleges, monstrous Midwest institutions, growing Pacific coast universities had mastered this new sport of football, the unholy offspring of soccer, rugby and a street fight.
The South? The South was too busy trying to climb out of a post-Civil War hole to focus on anything as frivolous as football. The condescending verdict on the South: like war, industry, race relations and education, football was just one more province where the South fell short.
Then came the 1926 Rose Bowl, and nothing about college football in the South — or anywhere else in the country — would ever be the same again.”
The South was overrun by carpetbagging Republicans from the North who took financial advantage of what was left after the Civil War. While there was new-found freedom for former slaves ensured by civil rights acts passed under President Ulysses S. Grant from 1868-1876, there was widespread poverty and destitution during Reconstruction among people of every race which lasted through the Great Depression.
“The South labored under the weight of its own irrelevance and disrespect — some self-inflicted, some perpetuated by the rest of the nation — and any chance to claw back a little self-esteem was a welcome one.
Alabama hired Wallace Wade as head coach of the football team in 1923. By 1926, he led the Tide to a 9-0 regular-season record as a member of the twenty-team Southern Conference which included teams such as Washington & Lee, Tulane and Georgia.
The Rose Bowl was established in 1902 as a way to pay for the annual Tournament of Roses Parade and was initially known as The Tournament East-West Game. It pitted a team from the Pacific Coast Conference against a powerhouse from the east such as Michigan, Harvard and Ohio State.
“’In those days, Alabama, or the Southern teams, weren’t noted for great football potential’, Alabama halfback and future Western movie star Johnny Mack Brown said in 1969. ‘It seems like they thought perhaps we were lazy, full of hookworms or something of that sort’.”
Alabama was invited after four other eastern teams declined because of concerns about interrupting final exams and in no small part due to the fact Wade was a member of the 1915 Brown University team which played in the 1916 Rose Bowl. Washington was deemed the overwhelming favorite. The “Purple Tornado” as they were known then had posted nine straight undefeated seasons from 1908 to 1916.
“Famed humorist Will Rogers dismissed the Tide’s hometown as ‘Tusca-loser.’ One sportswriter picked Washington to win by 51 points. Another said the Huskies would “blow the Crimson Tide back across the continent as a pale pink stream.”
Southerners were starved for success of any kind, whether it came on the football field; in politics or in business.
“By the time they get [to Pasadena], they’re not just the University of Alabama football team,” Alabama historian and Auburn professor emeritus Wayne Flynt said in “Roses of Crimson,” a 1997 Alabama public television documentary about the 1926 Rose Bowl. “They are the South’s football team, and they are sort of reliving the sectionalism of 100 years of competition between North and South.”
“‘Southern football is not recognized or respected,’ Wade said in his pregame speech. ‘Boys, here’s your chance to change that forever.’”
Washington had their way with Alabama in the first half and coasted to a 12-0 lead. “At halftime, Wade walked into the locker room, looked at his battered players, and uttered one simple line: ‘And they told me that boys from the South would fight’. That was all he said, and all he needed to say”.
Alabama scored three touchdowns in less than seven minutes in the third quarter to take a 20-12 lead.
“’The third period will go down as the greatest chapter Alabama has ever written in the Book of Football,’” Birmingham News reporter Zipp Newman wrote after the game. ‘It was as if Southerners had proven something that the South had been trying to prove ever since the Civil War — that we were as good as anybody else,’ Flynt said.”
The Alabama football players were hailed as conquering heroes as they returned by train across the south to Tuscaloosa. It took another fifty years and another round of civil rights to permeate the South but today, almost one hundred years later, southerners of all races can thank the Alabama Crimson Tide and Coach Wallace Wade, who left Alabama in 1931 to coach Duke to national prominence, for winning the 1926 Rose Bowl and changing the attitude and outlook of the South for the 20th century.